Mustard Fields

"Can I borrow your husband?" Maddie Timberland was standing on the front stoop of the house directly opposite her split-level ranch.

"Well, that sounds rather obscene," Kimberly Osborne tittered.

Maddie had always considered the woman a latter-day Stepford wife - a gynoid designed to look the part but with few if any feminine virtues. For the third day in a row the temperature was already hovering in the high eighties, but the svelte blonde with the tepid smile seemed unaffected by the heat wave. "My lawn mower keeps sputtering and dying out," Maddie explained.

Maddie wished Kimberly would call her husband, but she just stood there gawking at her like she was a Jehovah Witness prospecting for fresh converts. The woman aggravated the hell out of her, but what could she do? Kimberly's husband was a regular wizard with anything mechanical, and Maddie hadn't had a spouse in the picture for the past five years. Not that Jake, had he still been around, would have known what to do. Finally, Kimberly stepped out on the front stoop. The woman was dressed in a snazzy pair of spandex shorts and Addidas sneakers. In her right hand was a mug of fresh-brewed tea with a slice of lemon bobbing up and down. "I was just going for a walk."

Going for walks - that's all Kimberly Osborne ever did. It was her all-consuming passion. Other woman raised families, held careers, nursed chronically ill relatives, volunteered at the local library or taught English as a second language. Kimberly fixed herself a cup of Bigelow's English breakfast tea, which she leisurely sipped on the short ride in her twin-turbo BMW328 with the retractable hardtop to the Brandenberg Athletic Field where she power walked around the track a dozen times or so. Sometimes she brought small weights which she pumped furiously in order to raise her metabolism and burn extra calories. After the exercise regimen, she ate a buttered croissant and swigged a second cup of tea at the Honey Dew Donut shop in the center of town. Then she went home and formally started her day, which consisted of not much of anything.

Maddie didn't know what to think. Even though Kimberly had always been decent to her in a deferential sort of way, the insipid creature freaked her out. And here Maddie was standing on the Osborne's front stairs ingratiating herself, begging for small favors.

Well, maybe Maddie was just a tad jealous.

Not that she had any reason to be. She had a reasonably good figure, but you would never know it by the way clothes hung on her angular frame. Maddie's hair was dark and straight. If she grew it long, the wispy strands hung limply. An act of desperation, she had her stylist trim it short over the summer. The page boy was suppose to make the lanky woman who turned forty on Tuesday look mod, hip, cool—not like Tinker Bell in midlife crisis. Over the years, the body had seen a bit of wear and tear—a handful of birthing stretch marks around the lower belly and, more recently, a smattering of crow’s feet about the eyes - the not-so-subtle indignities of aging. And, within the last year or so, her breasts had begun to sag, enough so to precipitate an anxiety attack bordering on full-blown despair. By comparison, Kimberly's perky little breasts would do what they were meant to do with or without the supportive services of a sports bra; that taken together with the high cheekbones, willowy legs and hazel eyes made the woman a complete knockout.

Trevor, who had been cleaning out the gutters in the back yard, came around the side of the house. "Maddie's lawnmower is busted," Kimberly said. "Perhaps you could take a look."

He stepped closer and the musky scent of English Leather pervaded the humid air. With his ruddy complexion and Vandyke beard, Trevor exuded a relaxed competence. The man stripped off a pair of rawhide work gloves. "Let me grab some tools."

When he was gone, Kimberly added, "He's a real nutcase when it comes to his Toro self-propelled. Every spring he does a complete tune-up… even sharpens the mulching blade by hand with a metal rasp." She giggled, a breezy, adolescent laugh. "Don't know what I'd do without him." Maddie wasn't quite sure what she would do without him either, but, as a slightly horny, unattached female, it didn't seem appropriate to share that intimacy with Kimberly.

*****

The previous winter when a nor'easter dumped a foot and a half of snow in Maddie's driveway, Trevor slogged across the street with his Ariens two-cycle snow thrower and cleared the icy mess away inside half an hour. He had purchased the super-deluxe model, the bright orange monster big as a tank that registered an apocalyptic roar when he fired up the engine. The sixteen-inch, serrated steel augur tossed the snow effortlessly fifty feet onto the side lawn. Maddie didn't ask Trevor to do it. He never even rang the bell, just cleared all the snow away and went home - chug, chug, chug - guiding the machine, like a docile beast, in low gear.

"Your lawnmower is dead?" Trevor was unscrewing a tin lid on the left side of the two-stroke engine. "Let's have a look-see." Maddie dropped down on her haunches and tried to make mental notes in the event the temperamental machine went on the fritz again.

Trevor pulled the metal cover away and gestured with a finger at a wedge of yellow, spongy material. "That's your air filter." He pulled the soft block free of the compartment and washed it clean with the garden hose. "Dirt or grass clippings can block the passageway and foul the fuel mixture." After thoroughly cleaning the filter, Trevor screwed the lid back in place. "Are you aware that a groundhog is devouring your garden?"

Maddie glanced over her shoulder. In the far corner of the yard, a burly ground hog had wriggled under the wire netting and was feasting on a row of carrot tops. "That's Burt ...a regular visitor. We've agreed to share the harvest."

Trevor's blank expression eased into a lukewarm grin. "You grow the vegetables. What does the rodent contribute?"

"He's quiet, stolid… a creature of few, pithy words and very indefinite wants. We have this understanding." Maddie waved her arms up over her head - once, twice. The groundhog scurried along the perimeter of the garden, which was overgrown with crabgrass and noxious jimson weed, before disappearing into the underbrush. By the wry look on his face, her neighbor had picked up on the not-so-veiled allusion to Maddie's former spouse but opted to let it pass.

"I just finished the novel, My Antonia, by Willa Cather," Maddie noted. Trevor was an avid reader. It was the one hobby the neighbors shared in common and when, on the few rare occasions that Maddie had him to herself, she enjoyed the intellectual tête-à-tête. "The National Organization of Women was recently advising members not to patronize her works."

Trevor tipped the mower up on its side and was checking the blade and undercarriage. "And why was that?" Setting the machine back down on its wheels, he examined the choke adjustment.

"At the end of the novel, the heroine marries and goes to live on a farm."

"And the radical feminists viewed that as a cop-out?" Maddie nodded once. "What's your take on Ms. Cather's fall from literary grace?"

"Asking you to help me with the broken-down lawnmower puts me squarely in the enemy camp."

Trevor, who seemed reasonably sure the choke was working properly, rose to his feet and stepped around to the front of the machine. "My daughter, Melissa, was accepted to Northeastern for the fall semester." The Osborne's had two children. The oldest boy was in his last year at Boston College, studying engineering.

"Congratulations!"

"I'm serving Kimberly with divorce papers."

"Excuse me?"

He fitted a silver socket onto a ratchet and, pulling the spark plug wire free of the copper tip, seated the tool over the slender, ceramic stub. "Next week. I'm moving into an efficiently apartment in Foxboro. I can't live with the woman anymore." Five flicks of the wrist and the badly corroded spark plug wobbled free of the engine block. He stood up straight, glanced at her absently and looked away. "You divorced Jake and with good reason, so you know how it is."

Maddie's husband was a thirty-five year old adolescent trapped in a man's body. He didn't need a wife as much as a nursemaid or nanny. And Trevor's wife wasn't much better. The man wiped the blackened deposits away from the tip of the sparkplug then ran a piece of bluish-black Emory cloth over the sooty mess. After a moment the abrasive cut through and the metal arm began to shine. "That should do it." He fitted the sparkplug back in the engine and snugged it hand-tight with the socket.

"She doesn't know?"

The man shrugged. "I'm planning to break the news over the weekend. In all likelihood, she'll sell the house and go live with her mother. The old lady will help her over the worst of it. Kimberly… she's not like you - resourceful and self-sufficient."

He paused to wipe a bead of sweat that was gathering on his forehead. “I’m not leaving Kimberly for another woman.” He looked Maddie full in the face and held her eyes for a solid five seconds before turning away. “I’ve never cheated on my wife. Not once.” He primed the engine then gave a tug on the starter cord. The mower fired up on the first try. "You're good for another hundred thousand miles." Trevor collected his tools and sauntered back across the street to the home with the double garage, in-ground pool and perfectly manicured lawn that he would be shortly vacating.

*****

The temperature rose another five degrees, bludgeoning Maddie's brain into a state of vegetative torpor as she groomed the lawn. Dragging the weed whacker out from the shed, she trimmed around the bricks framing the front walkway, as though sprucing up the property might somehow tidy the neighborhood as a whole.

Two thoughts came to mind. When her ex-husband, Jake, cleared out, a subtle settling process took hold. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All the white noise of his endless finagling, scheming, angling and parasitic machinations fell away. The din dissolved instantaneously in blissful silence. Maddie bathed in the lush tranquility, luxuriated in the rich nothingness of total peace. No more bah, blah, blah. Maddie wandered about the house with a shitty grin, looking as though she had lost her sanity. But she lost nothing. Rather, the woman had regained her fundamental essence.

One day in late October after the divorce, Maddie drove to the outlet stores in Kittery, Maine and walked the malls. She made the two-hour drive alone in the late fall with the windows rolled down and a chilled breeze stinging her cheeks. The season long over, nobody was there other than a few diehard tourists. It didn't matter. Maddie felt a rush of sublime serenity. On a whim, she took the interstate 95 north straight through Boston, slicing across the lower edge of New Hampshire up around Rye Beach and Portsmouth. She could have never done such a thing when Jake was around. Actually, that wasn't totally accurate. She could have taken him along for the ride, but then there would be the endless prattle, the mindless nattering that sapped her spirit - the blustery blather of a lost, clueless, unsalvageable soul. Independence had its downside. Maddie still suffered bouts of loneliness and self-recrimination; or maybe it was guilt for going against the grain, thumbing her nose at social convention. But that didn't last long.

*****

Finishing the yard work, Maddie went indoors to pack. After supper, she was taking her daughter, Angie, for a Cape Cod weekend getaway. They had a cousin's cabin through Sunday - a mini¬-vacation in Mashpee. Climbing the stairs, she entered the girl’s bedroom. Angie was curled up on the bed reading a paperback. On the cover of the book was a picture of a bearded Hindu poised in full lotus position. A chalkboard hung from the mystic’s neck by a rawhide string.

“Is that required reading, or are you off on another spiritual odyssey?”

With the breakup of the marriage, Angie developed a spiritual wanderlust. A short flirtation with Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Scientists played itself out in trips to a musty reading room on Huntington Avenue and an occasional Sunday service. That lasted a sum total of three months. Later Maddie found several Hari Krishna brochures wrapped in a furry tangle of dust bunnies under her daughter’s bed. She never broached the issue.

More recently, Angie had gone off with a friend to spend the weekend at a Sufi commune in upstate New York. The teens drove the entire length of the Massachusetts Turnpike, through the scenic Berkshires crossing over the state line heading westerly toward the Catskills. Nothing came of that either. There were no metaphysical earthquakes. The girl returned from the land of the whirling dervishes with a bad case of diarrhea and craving for junk food.

Angie threw the book aside. “I’m hungry. Could you fix me a Mexican omelet?”

In the kitchen Maddie cracked a couple eggs and scrambled them briskly with a fork. She diced some sweet onion together with green pepper and warmed them in a pan until the translucent onions turned pearly. While the vegetables were cooking she laid a row of sliced pepperoni on the edge of a plate and opened a bag of cheddar cheese. "Mr. Osborne is leaving his wife."

“Cripes!" Angie bellowed, making a sarcastic snorting sound. "At the rate we're going, there won't be a married couple - happy or otherwise - within a five-mile radius."

"That's a bit extreme." Maddie added a dash of salt and pepper; when the vegetables were sufficiently caramelized, she slid them directly from the pan into the egg and then poured the batter back into the pan. Drizzling cheese over the egg, she topped the concoction with a layer of pepperoni. When the egg began to sizzle, she added a splash of water and covered the pan, poaching the extravagant omelet. Steam - that was the trick. The bottom never burned and it came out perfect every time.

Maddie lifted the lid. A cloud of sweet smelling moistness floated toward the ceiling. Folding the sides of the omelet toward the middle, she added another tablespoon of water then lowered the lid. "Everything's on the hush-hush. The wife apparently doesn't know yet." Maddie slid the egg onto a plate, placed a dollop of sour cream on top of the omelet then rounded off the concoction with a splash of mild salsa.

Finding a seat at the kitchen table she watched as her daughter ate. The two shared little physical resemblance. Angie was big boned with a fleshy nose and bronze complexion. Not pretty in the traditional sense but attractive, sensuous even, in her quirky, understated way. “This is wicked good!” The girl smeared more salsa on what was left of the omelet. The oils from the pepperoni bled into the egg staining it with an orange glow. "I wouldn't mind a guy like Mr. Osborne for a step-father."

"Well that's not going to happen," Maddie shot back just a bit too insistently.

"Why not?"

"For God's sake, the poor slob isn't even separated much less divorced! More to the point, his wife doesn't know that her husband's moving out." Maddie was feeling queasy; as though she might need to lie down to clear her head. “About that weird book,” she pressed, shifting the conversation elsewhere.

“It’s no big deal!” Angie replied. After a moment she added, “Swami Muktananda got disillusioned with the material world, so he took a vow of silence.”

“Language being corrosive to the spirit,” Maddie added. How many times early on in the marriage had Maddie wished Jake had taken a similar vow?

“At first he communicated by scribbling brief messages on a chalk board. Then, after a couple years, the swami announced that he would put away the board and begin speaking again. But when the moment arrived, he had a change of heart, went into spiritual seclusion and never spoke another word for the remainder of his worldly existence.”

Maddie squirted a stream of dish detergent into the sink and let the water fill. “You’re not planning - ”

“For God’s sakes,” Angie exploded, “it's just some dopey book!”

Maddie tapped her daughter on the wrist. “Are you packed for the trip?”

“All set.” Angie rose from the table and began putting food away. The women were only taking bare necessities - a couple changes of underwear, towels, sheets and no cosmetics. There was no one Maddie had to impress on the island. Rather, she had planned the trip as down time - a chance to decompress, recharge her emotional battery.

*****
The drive to Cape Cod was uneventful. Few people were heading south. The sugar maples and oaks gradually gave way to scrub pine rooted in bleached soil. A huge hawk sat far up in a scrawny pine tree just outside of Fall River. As they sped past, the bird spread its massive wings and flew off to the north, on an updraft of super-heated air. “Your father’s stopping by to see you Tuesday,” Maddie said. The predatory bird had nudged her memory, a free association of sorts.

“Whatever.” Angie curled up in a fetal position next to her mother with her knees jammed up against the dash. They reached the Bourne Bridge that took them across the Cape Cod Canal in record time. Halfway around the rotary, they picked up route six that meandered all the way to Hyannis, where the Kennedys lived and, still further north, to Provincetown.

Finally they reached the causeway that connected the island where the cabin was situated. “What the heck is that?” Angie pointed to a large bushy object perched on top of a telephone pole. The pole was forty feet tall and tilted at a queer angle. A staccato, chirping whistle filtered down to the marshy wetlands.

“Osprey nest.” Maddie replied. With their white breasts and bellies, Ospreys were one of the largest birds of prey in North America. The wingspan alone could reach well over five feet. The Ospreys fed almost exclusively on fish. "The birds are protected under the endangered species act and with good reason.”

A large bird suddenly appeared, soaring in from the bay and landed on top of the rickety structure. “They look like they can fend for themselves,” Angie replied.

Maddie shook her head. The species had gone into a steady decline since the early nineteen fifties due to pesticide poisoning. But after the ban on DDT, the massive birds bounced back. They built their nests frequently on manmade structures like telephone poles, duck blinds and even channel markers. Easing passed the pole on the thin slip of roadway, they found the cabin a short distance nestled between a row of holly and slender birch trees. What little light remained quickly bled out of the sky and the New England night arrived serene and darkly beautiful. From the upstairs bedroom Maddie looked out over a calm bay. Too far away to be seen, the island of Martha’s Vineyard rose out of the Atlantic waters due south. Nantucket, the former whaling center, sat only a handful of mile off to the east. The women quickly arranged the linen, washed up and got ready for bed. Angie shuffled into the bedroom barefoot. “Why doesn't Mr. Osborne love his wife anymore?"

"I don't know."

"Does he have a girlfriend?"

"No. He said he wasn't cheating and I believe him." Maddie sighed and pulled my daughter close, rubbing the nape of her neck.”

She squeezed her mother’s hand. “I’m tired. Goodnight.”

A thousand questions in search of a thousand and one answers. It was an old Arabic saying Maddie read somewhere, possibly in college, the implication being that a person, no matter how sincere and earnest, can search a lifetime and still come up short. She listened to her daughter’s steady breathing – deep and serene. The sleep of youth with little to no excess emotional baggage. As tired as Maddie was from the drive south, she hovered on the edge of sleep but could not slip across the threshold. Was there some bit of unfinished business? Why was Trevor Osborne leaving his wife? Kimberly wasn't a bad person. There was nothing inherently wrong with her. But neither was there very much of anything right about the woman. She was a trophy wife, a meaningless appendage. Kimberly Osborne was Jake in drag.

*****
In the morning they watched the harbormaster cruise up the channel from the breakwater. During the summer he checked permits for anyone digging clams. Locals waded out waist deep with a wire clam rake, which they scraped along the sandy bottom. When they hit a hard object, they scooped it up. Mussels, smallish clams, succulent quahogs, even spiny starfish were all fair game.

They drove back across the narrow slip of land that connected the island to the mainland. Wild tiger lilies, yellow with speckled mouths and lavender-fringed blossoms fading toward porcelain centers, rimmed the inland grasses. High up in the telephone pole, the osprey was feeding her young. Maddie pulled off the road onto the stiff marsh grass so they could get a better view. “Osprey eggs seldom hatch at the same time," she explained. "There could be a lapse of five days between first born and the last chicks." As Maddie explained it, the older chick dominated the younger ones. If hunting was good, there’s no problem among the chicks. But if food was scarce, older ones wouldn’t share even to the point of starvation. The women craned their heads far back but all they could see was the huge basket-shaped nest fashioned from twigs and branches.

The twosome ate breakfast at a bagel shop near the rotary then drove out to South Cape Beach. The beach was empty except for an occasional surf caster and older couple searching for polished sea glass. The bluefish had been running since late June and sea bass were also still plentiful.

A flock of grayish-brown whimbrels bobbed easily on the calm water. Near a hillock in the distance, stiff plume grass and salt spray roses bloomed close by a marshy wetland where phragmites reed rose four feet out of the water on elegant, plumed stems. Angie meandered near the shallow surf, dodging stranded horseshoe crabs and rubbery stalks of seaweed. A pale jellyfish floated by, sucked in toward shore then thrust back to sea by the whimsical currents. They skirted a cove and, on the far end, found a middle-aged man laying out the frame of a smallish kite on a terrycloth beach towel. Thirty feet away a team of three men was flying similar bat-shaped kites in precision drill. "Those are synchronized flying kites," Maddie said. With a hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun, she stared up into the sky. “Very expensive.”

Angie followed the trio of kites as they pirouetted in a perfect figure-eight then hovered motionless for a fraction of a second before darting off in another combination of twists and turns “Next month there's an oceanfront festival off Newport. Kite clubs from as far away as Connecticut and New Jersey will be competing. My parents and I went every year.”

The festival featured teams from all over New England. The more sophisticated models were constructed of lightweight, space-age metals and colorful fabrics. Four-member groups took turns running through a series of choreographed maneuvers, with the team leader calling out directions seconds in advance of each, new routine.

"Too bad!" Angie said, gesturing with her eyes. The end kite on the far left suddenly veered off in the wrong direction from the other three. "He missed the call." The young girl had never seen anything quite like it. The kites dived and soared in perfect - or, as in the previous, botched effort, near perfect - unison, covering a span of a hundred feet out toward the ocean.

"See how they adjust the height and direction,” Maddie said, “by moving their hands."

Angie had been too busy enjoying the acrobatics to notice how the men handled the strings. But now she could see, as the kites tacked in a new direction, the three sets of hands moving in and out, up and down, accordingly.

"Kites are easy,” Maddie thought on the walk back. Angie was skipping about in the tumbling surf. “When something goes wrong with the routine, you adjust the line or check the metal kite frame. With human nature it's not so simple.” Maddie glanced over her shoulder at her daughter bringing up the rear. Angie looked up and smiled - a quirky, darkly beautiful expression that pulled her malleable features at cross-purposes.

“There was a letter from the court,” Angie said.

Up ahead a tall man in his thirties was surfcasting with a metal lure that sailed far out over the breaking surf in a looping arc. “I asked the judge for a few extra dollars alimony, but it wasn’t meant to be.”

Angie put her hands inside the pouch on her windbreaker. “Why didn’t you ask dad directly?” Maddie had asked Jake on several occasions - more like begged. But she had no desire to tell her daughter. “He doesn’t get it, does he?” Angie said, anticipating her mother's unspoken thoughts.

“No, I guess not.”

Monkey syndrome. That’s what Maddie called Jake's affliction. Baby monkeys developed at the same rate as humans up to a certain fixed point. Then the primates hit an intellectual brick wall and stopped learning. Jake was a conniver, an ace at using the system to beat the system, but as a parent his potential petered out shortly after his daughter was born. Now, strangely enough, Angie had come into her own and, in myriad ways that Jake could never comprehend, outstripped her father.

They hung back to the left of the surfcaster, watching him heave the monofilament line out over the water. “Any luck?”

“Not today.” He kept jerking at the rod with a spastic pumping action to simulate an injured minnow on the end of the line. “Too windy… fish aren’t cooperating.” He gestured with his head so they could pass safely.

“Dad’s got this new girl friend,” Angie said.

“What happened to Gloria?” The young girl shrugged. “What’s the new one like?”

Angie flicked her hair back over a shoulder. The sun caught the blond highlights in the dusky, chestnut colored strands. She didn’t answer right away. “She’s nice enough.”

Another unwitting victim. When an Osprey caught a fish, it always carried the prey back to the nest tail down so its flight was unencumbered. Maddie imagined Jake carrying his latest romantic quarry back to the domestic nest in similar fashion but kept the cynicism to herself. A soft breeze was blowing now diagonally across the beach. They could smell the pebbly seaweed drying in the damp sand. Up ahead another fisherman was threading a sea worm onto a barbed hook. The worm was blood red and slimy, its tiny legs and pincers writhing in agony. In a pail next to the fishing gear was a half dozen flounder, flat and smooth. “I’m going to take a vow of silence,” Maddie spoke in a confidential tone. “Show up to school on Monday morning with a chalkboard on a string.”

“And how exactly are you going teach eighth-grade English?”

“Don’t know. Haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

A chalkboard and a string. Maddie was talking nonsense, but behind the silly blather hid a darker reality. The brown-skinned holy man could parade around with a goofy chalkboard dangling from his scrawny neck. But maybe he was a colossal faker - that’s faker, not ‘fakir’, as in religious mendicant - and who would know the difference? He never spoke a solitary word just smiled incessantly. Enlightened soul or simpleton - besides levitation, mind travel to distant cosmic galaxies and sleeping on a bed on rusty, sixteen-penny nails, did the mystic possess any practical skills? Could he teach eighth graders how to conjugate a verb? Navigate a fifteen year old through life's mind fields? Maddie was tired of all the phony baloney, the verisimilitude, the appearance of truth, the sham. Maybe the bearded yogi in the geriatric diaper was on to something. Or just maybe he was laughing at humanity behind his silvery whiskers.

*****

On Sunday morning a damp chill gripped the air, but the sun quickly rose over the bay nudging the temperature up to a comfortable eighty degrees. Crossing the inlet, the Osprey were feasting on the remains of a large fish. The mother held the mangled body in her beak while the fledglings ripped the flesh to pieces.

They cruised south on Route 28 into the center of Hyannis where the harbor was filled with private yachts and sailboats. On the main square bordering the wharf, they found a few boutiques open early but came away empty handed. But for the colonial New England architecture and oak trees, they could just as easily been on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive. They bought cappuccinos and croissants at a gourmet pastry shop and lounged outside on metal folding chairs with their food.

An elderly woman with a wrinkled face and platinum colored hair emerged from a jewelry store with several bags. She was carrying a funny looking dog that resembled a cross between a Shiatsu and a pug. The dog had a face like an exploded cigar with dark, spiky hairs sprouting in a dozen different directions. The pooch wore a collar studded with garish stones. The woman hurried past with a preoccupied expression, on her way to some hoity-toity tea party or socialite function.

“Such a slave to fashion,” Maddie muttered under her breath.

A Boston Brahman with a pampered pooch - not the sort of woman who would ever have to beg the courts for chump change. But still, the weather was delightful and it felt wonderful to get away. Two doors down was a store with a blue awning. The sign over the door read Cape Cod Collectibles. Maddie stepped over the threshold. Metal sculpture and small statuettes in various medium rested on tiered displays. Wash in a soft sheen of track lighting, glazed pottery and an assortment of porcelain figurines rimmed the far wall. From a speaker in the rear, Clifford Brown's limpid jazz trumpet was navigating through the melodic chords to Joy Spring. The smoky horn leaped into the upper register, hammering out a barrage of staccato triplets before settling back into the final chorus of the tune.

A man came out from behind the counter. He was casually dressed in a V-necked sweater and hush puppies. “That sculpture you were admiring is by a local artist.” The fellow had a boyish appearance despite a barren patch on the back of his skull where the hair had thinned away to a mere wisp. “It just sold yesterday.”

The piece, which stood four feet high, had been executed entirely in thin-gauged, brass. Using multiple strands of wire to recreate the instrument and performer, the artist had literally drawn the figure of a jazz saxophonist in silhouette. Off to the side was a trumpeter, a skier and a ballerina up on her toes. A five hundred dollar prima ballerina!

Maddie budgeted everything. Now, without that extra twenty-five bucks from Jake, there was no margin for error. And yet, some people could blow five hundred dollars on a brass ballerina and never give the extravagance a second thought. The Kennedy compound was less than a mile down the road. The senator from Massachusetts could, on a whim, buy the ballerina, jazz saxophonist or an entire sixteen-piece big band without breaking a sweat. “Clever concept, don’t you think?” The proprietor explained how the artist drew a rough sketch in charcoal in order to visualize each figure. Then, using the drawing as a template, he shaped, rolled and twisted dozens of metal strands bringing the figure to life. “They’re three-dimensional,” he added. “Each image has depth despite the thinness of the metal.”

The garrulous owner knew Maddie and her daughter had no intention of buying anything but didn’t seem to care and Maddie appreciated that. To meet someone without an agenda or ulterior motive was refreshing. He handed her a business card. “Feel free to stop in any time.”

*****
The winter that Maddie dumped her husband - the decision was unilateral - Jake was making regular pilgrimages to the social security office on Cooper Avenue, angling to get on medical disability for an old back injury. A herniated disc in the lumbar region - that was the provisional diagnosis. "Why don't you lose some weight and try physical therapy?" Maddie offered.

"I was hoping you’d support me on this." Jake's face assumed that hurt, little-boy expression that in recent months caused Maddie to flinch inwardly and avert her eyes. "When we married, you were out on a workman's compensation claim."

Jake had tripped over a bunched rug in the lobby of the Libby Fruit Processing Center. A bunched rug - he milked that one for a year and a half until the medical board autocratically ordered him back to work or out on the streets. Three years later, Jake argued with his immediate supervisor at the plant over vacation pay and finessed the squabble into sixteen months of unemployment benefits. Now, with his latest get-rich-quick scheme, he hobbled around the house wearing an elaborate back brace.

"What if they offer you a desk job?"

"Yeah, well… that hasn't happened and I need a paycheck."

The company couldn't offer Maddie's husband a desk job. He lacked both the personality and tact to oversee other people. The saddest thing of all, perhaps, was that Maddie felt absolutely no empathy for her soon-to-be ex-husband. He wasn't a bad person. He was just... Well, what difference did it make?

Buyer beware! Let Jake Timberland become someone else's burden. Maddie had been harangued by his vacuous pipedreams for eight years. Enough was enough!

*****
A week after they returned from the Cape Cod mini-vacation, Trevor Osborne's slate blue Toyota was gone from the driveway across the street. The following month a 'For Sale' sign went up on the front lawn. Kimberly abandoned the property to a real estate broker and went to live with her mother.

Five years passed. The new owners were dark-skinned Hispanic, quiet unassuming people who always greeted them with a friendly wave. Maddie never heard from Kimberly, but a neighbor two streets over, who was also a fitness buff, reported that, within eight months of the final divorce decree, she married an orthodontist on the rebound, so to speak, and was living in a mini-mansion on the south shore of Boston.

Maddie had this schizoid fantasy of Kimberly Osborne power walking down the aisle while in the background, a massive pipe organ was belting out the opening fanfare to Mendelssohn’s Wedding March. The well-toned, middle-aged woman was decked out in eggshell white, just like the first time around but with one minor deviation from social decorum: in her left hand was a mug of steaming Bigelow tea drizzled with honey and a slice of lemon.

With this ring, I thee wed. Of course the former Kimberly Osborne would have to shift the cup to the other hand in order to receive the wedding band, but that was just a minor inconvenience. The woman had devoted her life to doing as little as possible. Her college degree in elementary education was probably moldering in a storage box crammed under the crawl space in her palatial new digs. She had never worked a day in her life, not even as a substitute teacher, and, in the end, everything had worked out splendidly.

*****
One day in June a small bubble envelope arrived in the mail.

I found this paperback in the 'remaindered' bin at the local bookstore, and, after reading it, immediately thought of you.

All my best,

Trevor

Maddie didn’t know why the flimsy note - exactly two dozen words all taken together - upset her so, but her hands were trembling when she laid it aside and reached for the well-thumbed paperback. The Field of Mustard by A.E. Coppard.

Who the hell was A.E. Coppard?

Placing the book on her bedside table, Maddie went out to do the grocery shopping. Later that night she read the title story then drank half a bottle of Chardonnay to settle her nerves. Over the next week or so Maddie read through the other stories. Then she went back and reread The Field of Mustard. Five more times she read it.

“On a windy afternoon in November they were gathering kindling in the Black Wood, Dinah Lock, Amy Hardwick, and Rose Olliver, three sere, disvirgined women from Pollack's Cross."

What could an unsuspecting reader say about an author who opened a story with such a sentence? They were all ‘disvirgined’- Maddie included Trevor Osborne in the mix as well - by life's vicissitudes. To become disvirgined has little to do with human anatomy; in Coppard’s grasp of the term, it meant losing one's sense of the astonishing.

Sere –such a strange word! Maddie hadn’t a clue what that meant and had to pull out her cherry red, Webster New World College Dictionary for a proper definition of dried up, shriveled, withered. Such a nice way to describe the fairer sex!

Tuesday evening Trevor called. "How did you like Mr. Coppard?"

"I liked him just fine." Maggie was thinking about Dinah Lock and her best friend Rose, two country women who had loved the same man, each in their own special way. All this took place in the textured fabric of a fairy tale fiction that felt more real than everything else. "Rufus Blackthorn, the gamekeeper… was he a good guy or a lothario?"

"No, he cherished women,” Trevor answered without hesitation. “Rufus was a decent sort."

"I thought so," Maggie replied, “but just wanted to be sure, that's all."

"Would you like to get together?" Trevor interrupted her bookish reveries.

"Yes, I'd like that very much."

"How's this weekend?" he pressed.

"Why wait? Come now."

"Even better!"

Once things were settled, the conversation about A.E. Coppard rambled doggedly on a bit longer. Maggie especially like Dusky Ruth, the tale about the traveler who slept with a bar maid but never quite got around to doing much of anything. Trevor thought Arabesque - The Mouse was far and away the best of the bunch. No writer had ever described a mother weaning her child by squirting breast milk into a sizzling hearth. And then, of course, there was the Higgler. Both agreed that the peddler's story, which opened the volume, was a masterful work of art.

The queer thought occurred to Maddie that a half hour passed and they had spoken only about make believe characters from an obscure book written in the early nineteenth century. Five long years had flown by and she hadn't thought to ask about Trevor’s children or personal affairs. "Why wait?" Maggie didn't realize that she was repeating herself. "There's no reason that you shouldn't come over now."